When teaching STEM courses, it is important to introduce state-of-the-art techniques. Students need to learn how to conduct experiments, analyse data and choose the most effective approaches to address meaningful situations. Here we present the assessment of the implementation of a structured inquiry-based activity aimed at teaching students about…

Developing Critical Thinking Skills (CTS) has been a primary educational goal in developed countries for several decades. However, even though Mexico recently embraced this educational trend in higher education, there is uncertainty about CTS development occurring under current conditions. Despite the abundance of quantitative studies examining…

Integrating STEM education within the elementary school science curriculum in Ontario, Canada, elevated the expectation for elementary preservice teachers to teach STEM skills such as problem-solving through coding. Research shows that educational robotics can promote STEM knowledge and skills. This mixed methods study investigates the effect of…

COVID-19, by all accounts, forced higher education to shift to distance delivery. As a result, faculty attempted to innovate and integrate new teaching methods as courses moved online. We utilized an online, virtual reality game to teach team decision-making as a function of leadership. In teams, learners worked cooperatively, making decisions and…

Problem-solving tasks form the backbone of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) curricula. Yet, how to improve self-monitoring and self-regulation when learning to solve problems has received relatively little attention in the self-regulated learning literature (as compared with, for instance, learning lists of items or…

Non-digital games are a tool that can help children to build and improve problem solving skills in early mathematics learning. Teachers need to design a learning activity using non-digital games taken account problem solving skills in the learning activities. However, the application of problemsolving skills in early mathematics learning…

This study examined the impact of STEM applications realized with 4th-grade elementary school students on their problem-solving skills. The study was conducted within the convergent parallel design framework, a mixed research method. The research was carried out with 42 4th-grade primary school students, 21 in the experimental group and 21 in the…

The practice of persisting and learning from design failures is essential to engineering design and offers unique ways of knowing and learning for K-12 students. To understand how students engage in the practice of persisting and learning from design failures, we must first understand how, if at all, they recognize that a design failure has…

We present a detailed analysis of two statistics lessons in lower secondary school, one in Denmark and the other in Japan. The aim of the study is to better understand how inquiry perspectives are implemented in statistics education and what cultural factors shape them. In particular, we draw on the theoretical framework of the Anthropological…

Universal Design (UD) involves the creation of accessible, flexible products that are functional for a wide population of users. Our problem-based learning exercise challenges student teams to create products and services guided by the principles of UD. After teams generate their new product concept, a spokesperson from each team pitches it in…

Picture students huddled around a 3D printer in a middle school classroom. They gaze at the object being printed, and exclamations of, "Where is that flag from?" "What does that symbol mean?" and "Oh; I didn't think of that!" can be heard. These examples of observation, curiosity, and critical thinking are the elusive…

This paper argues that development of students' evaluative judgement capability, which encapsulates a range of cognitive and social skills, should be considered as a primary objective of the collaborative problem-solving assessment practices in engineering. This is a response to call for preparing job-ready students. To meet the multiple demands…

An educational escape activity was developed, embedding elements of both augmented and immersive virtual reality technologies, in an active learning environment. The mental visualization of abstract concepts can be difficult for students, inhibiting their ability to reason cogently regarding important topics of stereochemistry. Consequently, an…

Basic medical laboratory courses (BMLCs) play an important role in medical educational courses helping the student acquire three important skills of surgical operating, collaborative learning, and problem solving. The outcome-based student assessment (OBSA) is a learning evaluation method that establishes specific evaluation points based on…

Problem-oriented teaching (POT) activities are important in classroom instruction. The level of student response can be influenced by different teacher behaviours in POT. However, the characteristics of teachers' multimodal behaviours at different levels of response are unclear. This study applied epistemic network analysis to explore the…